A Note from Doaa
I’m Doaa Bazan. I’m a pharmacist, a health and wellness coach, an independent researcher, and the creator of Gentle Emotional Engineering™.
I also write books.
More books than I once thought I was allowed to write, apparently.
I have questioned that a lot.
I questioned whether I write too much. Whether I move between subjects too much. Whether writing in English and Arabic made my work harder to understand as one body of work. Even within Arabic, I write differently depending on what I am writing and who I am writing for. Sometimes Egyptian Arabic is the language that feels right.
For some reason, I felt I needed to explain all of this.
Maybe even apologize for it a little.
As if a writer is supposed to choose one shelf and stay there.
But when I think about the libraries I grew up knowing, that was never how a library worked.
You walked in and there were shelves.
Different subjects. Different writers. Different languages. Books you knew you wanted and books you discovered because you happened to see them.
And you could borrow one.
You didn't need an income to be allowed to read.
That thought became increasingly important to me while I was trying to find ways to share my own books.
I tried different platforms, stores and payment methods. I kept running into things that made something very simple feel complicated.
A reader in one country could access something that a reader somewhere else couldn't. A payment option worked here and not there. I would find myself explaining why a book was on one platform, why another was free, why I chose a certain price, why something wasn't available in a particular country.
Some of those limitations come from where I live. Some come from the platforms available to me.
And some are simply my own limitations.
I am one person, working independently. There is a limit to what I can afford to build and offer.
I kept trying anyway.
Eventually I found myself thinking less about how to create another place to sell my books and more about what I actually wanted the place to feel like.
And what I wanted was a library.
An old-fashioned library, in a new form.
A place where you can come in without having decided to buy anything.
You can look at the shelves.
You might find a book about change beside a book about children. Something in English beside something in Arabic. And if I write in another form of Arabic one day, that can sit there too.
It doesn't make the library confused.
It makes it a library.
You can choose a book and borrow it for free. You can read it and return it. If you want to keep access to it, you can buy it. And if you want to spend more time across the library, there will be another way to do that too.
I don't want income to be the condition that decides whether someone gets to encounter my work.
I also know I cannot make everything free forever. I want this library to be something I can actually maintain. So I am trying to make room for both: access to reading, and a way for the work to support itself.
This is the best way I know how to do that with what I have.
Maybe that is also why the name came so easily.
Doaa’s Library.
Not Doaa's shop.
A library.
My books finally have one place to live, even when they don't all look or sound the same.
And you can come in from wherever you are.
Look around.
Choose what you want to read.
Borrow a book.
That's what libraries are for.
Doaa